Music : Independent Composers Group Resurfaces With a Mixed Bill

Many byways run off the mainstreams of contemporary composition. A few of them were represented in the latest concert put on by the Independent Composers Assn., our 15-year-old composers collective, which seems to surface now and again.

Continuous operation--”an average of 30 concerts” per year--is what the official program claimed on Saturday, when eight composers contributed to a fascinating evening at the Ruth Bachofner Gallery in Santa Monica. If the association mounts half that number in 1991-92, it will have earned genuine admiration.

The composers under scrutiny were Alfred Carlson, Frederick Moore, Stephen James Taylor, Rodney Oakes, Eliane Robert-George, Joanne Metcalf, Florence Riggs and Micheal Frances Smith, the last three, members of the improvising vocal ensemble, Voce Arcana.

Voce Arcana--the singers’ use of the singular noun is telling--opened the proceedings with a set of four improvisations characterized by wit, emotional range and brevity. The three composer-performers bring good taste and quickness as well as a wide palette of extended vocal techniques to their sounds-easy, pleasure-giving inventions. Not all of the following five compositions on the program met that standard.

Most promising, perhaps, was Robert-George’s engrossing, even haunting, quartet, “Etats d’Ame,” a 12-minute, highly compressed work in a stark, atonal style.

The accomplished and resourceful Jumelle String Quartet played the recent piece with tangible conviction and in an oddball seating arrangement, which put violist Diane Reedy and cellist Margaret Edmondson on the outside, closest to the audience, and violinists Cynthia McGurty and Ruth Johnson inside. In any case, it worked.

Frederick Moore’s “Manchester Between the Lakes,” a piece for narrator (the composer), electronics and tenor saxophone (Timothy B. Taylor), raises more questions than it answers, but intriguingly and playfully. In ten intense minutes, Moore makes imaginative use of both the sax and the English language, proving himself equally adept in both idioms.

A three-minute minimalist piece, Stephen James Taylor’s “Elements of the Earth,” juxtaposes a dancer (Mary Lou Taylor, who also made the choreography) against muddy electronics, which begin by sounding like a gamelan manque .

Rodney Oakes’ absorbing, electronics-with-trombone work, “Blues for Gorby,” sounds more ghostly than jazzy, but held the interest nonetheless. Alfred Carlson’s serial, conventional and fitfully charming “Dialogues” for oboe and piano completed the evening.